


Wretched Anxiety

by great-pan-is-dead (TheCrimsonDream)



Series: Parting of the Ways [1]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Anxiety, Death, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-11
Packaged: 2018-06-07 16:32:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6813241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCrimsonDream/pseuds/great-pan-is-dead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a terrible state, Louis tries to deter Claudia from her intentions to kill Lestat, and Claudia sees a side in them unkown to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wretched Anxiety

**Author's Note:**

> (sort of) Prompt: "“...to tell of the times he came to me in wretched anxiety, begging me never to leave him...” –Lestat, TVL  
> Claudia POV
> 
> Bit of a throw in the dark as I can't quite decide if I was finished with this or not.

  He came to me only once to speak of it; pale to almost transparency, starved. Rimmed round his lashes were lingering stains of red that stubbornly remained, and a thought rose as a slow breaking of the heart of me, in the time that hung around us whilst he found a voice, that he had never allowed me to see him like this. It also came to me, with that, that it did not appear such moods were unknown to him. Absent of coat and portrait strewn, he was a tragedy of finery, but looked as delicate as though the wind might blow him away in a scattering of charcoal hair and crumpled white linen.  Wavering in the doorway from which he had wandered from, he was hoarse when he eventually said to me;

  “I ask you, do not take his life.”

  The light of green did not seem at one with the world and he spoke as if numb to me before him. In an instant I could tell he had been to him- spoke to him, perhaps- talked with or been talked to, held or been held, but I had in faith that he would not have made word of it, and that was why he was here.

  “Why should I not, Louis?”

  I asked as if nothing was wrong, as if there was some absurdity in it, some innocence that did not involve how he seemed to break at the forming of words.

  “Because he is, as much as you are... a lover... and something more than that, perchance.”

 _Lover._ He struggled with the word, and it was not produced as delicately as the way he placed his thoughts to language, pronounced trippingly; not as though it were not true, but as though he did not believe it. I would have it forbidden to hear.

  “What more could he ever be?” 

  This time the demand grew short, and his eyes collected down at me in my simmering distemper, as he swayed like silk in a breeze.

  “He is already more. He is my maker, and rightly yours, I have yet to know how much that means-"

  “Your maker? Only in blood, for what has he done that’s made you? Or us! He is all but the unmaker of your life, of both our lives, and I will not let him unmake the second that he damned me to selfishness!”

  My foolish love’s lips formed a wound that bled, as if his whole being would crack around it, but his face was memories that reflected like a mirror.

  “Oh, Claudia, what would you know to come of me had I not been, as you called it, unmade.”

  His eyes were glassed over with an impenetrable distance that told me I could not understand. The time was allowed to go on in a dripping pain, but not long enough; for Lestat was to slowly unfold from round a corner of our private place in a corridor.

  The time had not been enough to ask, _if you call him a lover, are you in love with him?_ Patheticas it may have been _,_ but in his state of dark it weighed heavy in me that it was all but impossible to imagine he could forage strength to love anyone- not I, nor the fiend who confined me.

  Doubt allowed a small fear to creep in at the thought Lestat might have heard, might have scoured my mind, but he was close to human in colour, hair windswept; he had returned from feeding, but not in his usual manner. His interest was not on me. In a similarly relaxed state of dishevelment, his arms reached out gently to the lost Louis in a way that was curious to me, as if to guide a man who were blind. He came from behind in a careful openness, and bade Louis lifted his hands like cautiously spread wings to his. There was some care in his gestures that I had never known him to hold for me, and I witnessed before me the lines in which the “something more” lay between. Louis would need to feed, _or be fed;_ that was it. Skin to skin breathed away some cloud that hung in the air, although they only half looked at each other, in some strange croon they shared in a stifled peace.

_Shared._

And so Lestat was to die.


End file.
